Thursday, August 10, 2017

A return to Prairie Drive Park after last year'sinitialexcursion had another excellent lineup and even better weather. Free food for all gave locals and musical tourists a chance to mingle together and it was a real treat to hear music echoing through the well-used park. Essential city-building work from Toronto Arts Foundation's Arts in the Parks initiative — hopefully this will continue every summer.

As night fell and the playground cleared out, LAL closed the night with a conscious party, celebrating art and resilience. Appreciating the vibes in a neighbourhood she'd known since her childhood, singer Rosina Kazi's hands darted out around her in the barely-illuminated stage area, feeling her way through Nicholas Murray's beats like a teenager tentatively pacing through a darkened park, searching for one excitingly-illicit thrill or another.

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Founded as a blog about one curmudgeon's love affair with the em dash, Mechanical Forest Sound has grown to become a community-based archive of local musical culture. Assuming that "independent music" isn't just boys with guitars and "culture" isn't just some sort of pageant, MFS is an investigation of a wide range of artists, reflecting on concerts as shared experiences, acts of citizenship and a chance to get down — fuzzy photographs and clear-sounding original live recordings a specialty.

Current manifestations of this project include Track Could Bend, a monthly concert series featuring "improvised music and weird rock offshoots", presented in a casual environment.

At one point I wrote full-on concert reviews, and for longer I thought I would catch up and write about shows in the past. But these days, because of, y'know, life, do not expect much in the way of full show reviews — but live recordings with blurbs will be posted as quickly after the fact as is feasible.

All MP3's on this blog are audience recordings shared as a reminder of the excitement of seeing live music. If you are an artist who doesn't want their music shared in this way, please contact me and I shall remove it forthwith.